Pigeons don’t seem fun when you think about them, right? In Chicago, I once had a pigeon literally fly over and let the poop fall right in front of me, like it was a joke!! If you are a city dweller like me, you know how pesky pigeons can be. Personally, I get a bad feeling when people feed the pigeons because of what Pavlov told us about conditioning. Here in Buenos Aires, they exist just like in any other cities but for some reason people seem to kind of like them. It’s cute. It’s kind. Am I just not that kind? I am sure there are others like me here. I've always thought of them as rats with wings, but for now, I'll let myself appreciate those wacky-doodle birds.
FUN FACTS: to help us appreciate and better understand the pigeons.
• Pigeons are found almost everywhere on Earth; however, they don’t live in very cold places or in very dry places. There are no native pigeons on the Hawaiian Islands or on the islands of the mid-Atlantic ridge.
• Pigeon and dove are synonyms: they are the same thing.
• Pigeons drink water by sucking it up through the beak, a feature unusual in birds.
• City pigeons, carrier (or homing) pigeons, domestic pigeons raised for meat, and racing pigeons are all the same species, descended from the Rock Dove of Europe, North Africa, and South Asia.
• Because of their amazing ability to find their way home, even over very large distances, homing pigeons have been used to deliver messages since the time of the early Egyptians.
• The Passenger Pigeon may have once been the most numerous birds on Earth. In the early 1800s there were between 3 and 5 billion Passenger Pigeons in North America.
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